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Introducing Workshop Tactics by Pip Decks

These three team-strengthening tactics are just a small sample of the powerful facilitation tools available in the full Workshop Tactics deck by Pip Decks. With 54 carefully designed workshop recipe cards, you'll confidently lead teams through any collaborative challenge.

Workshop Tactics helps you:

• Transform good teams into great ones
• Create clarity around roles and responsibilities
• Unlock hidden potential within your existing team
• Build a foundation for effective collaboration
• Address team dynamics in a structured, positive way

As one healthcare leader put it: "Workshop Tactics gave us a structured way to address issues we've been dancing around for years. Instead of awkward conversations, we had productive discussions that actually led to solutions."

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Based on the Team Strengthening recipe from Workshop Tactics

"I designed this recipe to help established teams discover their hidden potential and work together more effectively."

– Charles Burdett, Founder of Pip Decks

The Team Chemistry Formula: 3 Powerful Tactics for Unbreakable Teams

A colleague of mine recently told me about a healthcare practice where staff turnover had reached an alarming 40% annually. Despite competitive salaries and decent benefits, people simply weren't sticking around. Practice managers were frustrated, patients noticed the constant shuffle of new faces, and the remaining staff were burning out covering for vacant positions. The leadership team had tried everything from casual Fridays to pizza parties, but nothing seemed to strengthen their team cohesion.

Six months after implementing a structured team workshop, the practice had transformed completely. My colleague reported that staff turnover had plummeted to under 10%, patient satisfaction scores were climbing, and the team operated with a newfound synchronicity that was palpable the moment you walked through the door. The transformation wasn't magic, and it certainly wasn't thanks to more pizza parties. It was the result of a structured team-strengthening workshop that uncovered hidden talents, clarified roles, and aligned everyone around shared goals.

In this guide, I'll share three powerful workshop tactics from Workshop Tactics by Pip Decks that will help you transform an ordinary working group into a cohesive, high-performing team that stays together and achieves remarkable results.

What We'll Cover in This Guide:

1. Understanding your collective goals with Sailboat
2. Defining clear roles and responsibilities with Roles and Responsibilities
3. Uncovering hidden talents with Skills Market

Let's explore these tactics with a real-world example: Pip's medical practice wants to improve employee retention and success by defining roles, unifying the team, and enhancing teamwork.

1. Understanding Your Collective Goals with Sailboat

Before addressing team dynamics, you need to ensure everyone understands and aligns with your collective goals. The Sailboat tactic uses a powerful visual metaphor to help teams identify their destination, what's driving them forward, and what's holding them back.

⏱️ Time: 1 hour
🧠 What's the goal? Find out what is driving your team and what may stop you from achieving your vision.
👀 Why this matters: This tactic brings together teams and stakeholders to gain a shared understanding of their goals, drivers, and barriers. You can find out what is slowing you down or if the purpose or goals are not quite right.

How to Use Sailboat:

1. Draw a boat to represent the team/project and an anchor to represent the barriers. Draw an island to represent the goals. (3 minutes)
2. Ask each participant to write down the team/project goals on sticky notes. Make sure the goals are S.M.A.R.T goals. (7 minutes)
3. Share and Theme Sort the goals near the island. (10 minutes)
4. Ask the group to write down the drivers towards the goal on sticky notes. A driver is the "why" behind the goal. (5 minutes)
5. Share and Theme Sort them near the sailboat. (10 minutes)
6. Write down the barriers (problems) to achieving the goals on sticky notes. (5 minutes)
7. Share and Theme Sort them near the anchor. (10 minutes)
8. Private Vote on the goals to find out what the group believes are the most important goals. (5 minutes)
9. Finally, Private Vote on the barriers to understand what the most important problem to solve is. (5 minutes)

Example from Pip's Medical Practice:

Pip's medical practice team identified several goals during their Sailboat session:

• Increase employee retention rate by 25% within the next 12 months
• Improve patient satisfaction scores from 3.8 to 4.5 out of 5 by the end of the year
• Reduce wait times for appointments from 3 weeks to 1 week within 6 months
• Create a comprehensive onboarding programme for new staff members within 3 months

When they discussed the drivers, the team revealed deeper motivations:

• Desire to provide the best possible patient care
• Professional growth and development
• Maintaining work-life balance while providing excellent service
• Building a practice with a stellar reputation in the community

The barriers they identified included:

• Unclear roles leading to work falling through the cracks
• Limited understanding of each other's skills and capabilities
• Poor communication between clinical and administrative staff
• Lack of formal processes for knowledge sharing

Through voting, the team prioritised employee retention as their top goal and unclear roles as the most critical barrier to address first.

2. Defining Clear Roles and Responsibilities with Roles and Responsibilities

With a clear understanding of your team's goals, it's time to address one of the most common causes of team dysfunction: role ambiguity. The Roles and Responsibilities tactic helps establish clarity about who does what, creating a foundation for effective collaboration.

⏱️ Time: 1 hour
🧠 What's the goal? Establish the roles in the team, and what each member does, discusses, and decides.
👀 Why this matters: This tactic helps you better understand each other's roles and learn who is responsible for what. Defining clear responsibilities prevents confusion around hierarchy and expertise. It reduces duplicate work and promotes better collaboration.

How to Use Roles and Responsibilities:

1. Create a column for each job within the team on a large surface. (2 minutes)
2. Create three rows labelled Do, Discuss, and Decide. (3 minutes)
3. Ask each person to complete the three rows for the discipline of the person sitting to their left on sticky notes—this builds empathy. If you are working virtually, create an alphabetical list and assign the person to the left on the list. (10 minutes)
   • Do: What are the core responsibilities of their job?
   • Discuss: How does their job interact with the wider team?
   • Decide: What are they responsible for deciding?
4. Have each person stick up their notes and share and discuss them with the group. (10 minutes)
5. For each person's own job, they can add a check mark beside the sticky note if they agree, or add an extra sticky note if something is missing from the definition. (20 minutes)
6. As a group, Private Vote each job to make sure the group is satisfied with the definitions. (10 minutes)

Example from Pip's Medical Practice:

The team created a comprehensive roles and responsibilities matrix for each position in the practice, including practice manager, physician, nurse, medical assistant, receptionist, and billing specialist.

For the medical assistant position, the team defined:

Do:

• Take patient vitals and document in the electronic health record
• Prepare examination rooms between patients
• Assist physicians during procedures
• Call in prescriptions to pharmacies

Discuss:

• Patient concerns and questions with nurses and physicians
• Scheduling considerations with reception staff
• Inventory needs with the practice manager
• Treatment plans with the clinical team

Decide:

• Which rooms to prepare and in what order
• When to alert the physician that a patient is ready
• How to prioritise multiple tasks during busy periods
• When to escalate a patient concern to a nurse or physician

This exercise revealed several overlaps between the medical assistant and nurse roles, which led to a productive discussion about task handoffs and collaboration. The team also identified gaps in the communication chain between clinical staff and the front desk that were causing patient scheduling issues.

3. Uncovering Hidden Talents with Skills Market

Even teams that have worked together for years often have untapped potential in the form of hidden skills and interests. The Skills Market tactic creates a fun, market-like environment where team members can showcase their abilities and discover collaboration opportunities.

⏱️ Time: 1 hour
🧠 What's the goal? Understand what skills each team member has so you can work better together.
👀 Why this matters: This tactic enables you to learn about each other's skills, abilities, and ambitions so you can understand how to help each other grow. Gain a broader picture across teams of the skills and abilities you have access to, and also where people would like to improve. This encourages a culture of learning and improvement, as well as creating connections where collaboration can happen.

How to Use Skills Market:

1. Set the scene of a market where everyone is setting up a stall to buy and sell their skills. (2 minutes)
2. Provide large pieces of paper for each participant to draw their own market stall with sections for their skills, and explain the sections they should include. If you are doing this online, make sure to pre-set up a shared board, like Miro. (2 minutes)
   • Current skills (that allow me to do my job)
   • Hidden skills (you might not know I have)
   • Desired skills (I want to develop or learn)
3. Encourage creativity in drawing the market stalls and remind participants that design is not being judged. (1 minute)
4. Give time for participants to complete each section of their stall. Ask them to include 3-5 points for each section. (15 minutes)
5. Have participants stick up their skills market on a wall. (2 minutes)
6. As a group, move around the room together and allow each person to present their market. Point out something impressive about each market. (13 minutes)
7. Encourage others to leave their name next to skills they can help develop or want to "buy" and develop themselves. Each person must write "buy" or "develop" beside their name when writing on another market. (25 minutes)
8. Optional: Capture actions with Who, What, When. (10 minutes)

Example from Pip's Medical Practice:

The Skills Market revealed a treasure trove of hidden talents within the team:

The receptionist, who everyone viewed as simply excellent at organisation, revealed hidden skills in:

• Home repair and maintenance (from a previous career)
• Tango dancing (a weekend passion)
• Extensive knowledge of the Harry Potter universe

One of the nurses disclosed unexpected skills in:

• Website design and social media management
• Photography
• Creating step-by-step visual guides

The practice manager shared:

• Experience with data analysis and visualisation
• Public speaking and presentation skills
• Mindfulness and meditation practice

The Skills Market led to several actionable outcomes:

• The nurse with website skills volunteered to help refresh the practice's outdated website
• The receptionist offered to create visual standard operating procedures for front desk tasks
• The practice manager agreed to lead a short weekly mindfulness session before staff meetings
• A physician with Excel expertise offered to run a workshop on spreadsheet shortcuts for administrative staff

This activity not only identified valuable skills that were previously untapped but also fostered connections between team members who might not typically work closely together.

But What If We Don't Have Time for This?

Some leaders might resist dedicating time to these team-strengthening activities, arguing that they're too busy with "real work." But consider this: How much time and money is your organisation currently losing to high turnover, miscommunication, duplicated efforts, and missed opportunities for collaboration?

A well-facilitated team-strengthening workshop typically takes 3-4 hours, but can save you countless hours and thousands in recruitment costs. The medical practice I mentioned at the beginning calculated that their 30% reduction in turnover translated to over £100,000 in saved recruitment and training costs in just one year.

As one practice manager put it: "We thought we couldn't afford to take half a day away from patients for this workshop. What we learned was that we couldn't afford not to."

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Even with these powerful tactics, there are pitfalls to watch for:

1. Letting hierarchy stifle openness: Create a safe environment where everyone, regardless of position, feels comfortable sharing honestly. Consider having managers participate last in activities like the Skills Market.
2. Failing to address role conflicts in real-time: When the Roles and Responsibilities exercise reveals overlaps or gaps, address them immediately rather than deferring the conversation.
3. Neglecting follow-through: The energy from team-strengthening workshops can quickly dissipate without concrete action plans. Use the Who, What, When tactic to ensure accountability.
4. Treating it as a one-time fix: Strong teams require ongoing maintenance. Schedule regular check-ins to revisit goals, roles, and skill development opportunities.

Putting It All Together

These three workshop tactics from Pip Decks' Workshop Tactics form a powerful sequence for strengthening established teams:

1. Sailboat aligns the team around shared goals and identifies barriers to success
2. Roles and Responsibilities establishes clarity about who does what, preventing confusion and conflict
3. Skills Market uncovers hidden talents and creates opportunities for collaboration and growth

Together, they transform fragmented groups into cohesive teams with shared purpose, clear responsibilities, and mutual appreciation for each other's unique contributions. They replace assumptions with understanding, friction with flow, and isolation with collaboration.

But What If We Don't Have Time for This?

Some leaders might resist dedicating time to these team-strengthening activities, arguing that they're too busy with "real work." But consider this: How much time and money is your organisation currently losing to high turnover, miscommunication, duplicated efforts, and missed opportunities for collaboration?

A well-facilitated team-strengthening workshop typically takes 3-4 hours, but can save you countless hours and thousands in recruitment costs. The medical practice my colleague mentioned at the beginning calculated that their 30% reduction in turnover translated to over £100,000 in saved recruitment and training costs in just one year.

As one practice manager put it: "We thought we couldn't afford to take half a day away from patients for this workshop. What we learned was that we couldn't afford not to."

Ways to Use This Recipe

• Over multiple days: Three short sessions, about 1 hour each.
• Half-day experience: Three one-hour sessions with breaks in between.

What You Need Before You Start

In person

• Preparation (book room, invite people, write and share agenda)
• Materials (whiteboard, sticky notes, pens)
• Tech check (charger, adapter, screen projector)
• Room (refreshments, temperature, chairs, wall space)

Hybrid

• Preparation (book room, send call link, invite people, write and share agenda)
• Materials (whiteboard, sticky notes, pens, Miro board)
• Tech check (charger, adapter, screen projector)
• Room (refreshments, temperature, chairs, wall space)

Online

• Preparation (invite people, write and share agenda, create and send call invite)
• Materials (Miro board)
• Tech check (charger, adapter, Microphone/headphones)

Remember the healthcare practice mentioned at the beginning? According to my colleague, eighteen months after their team-strengthening workshop, they had become the employer of choice in their region, with a waiting list of practitioners wanting to join. Their patient satisfaction scores reached all-time highs, and they expanded their services based on previously untapped skills within their existing team.

Your team deserves the same advantages. Whether you're dealing with high turnover, poor communication, or simply wanting to take your team to the next level, these tactics will help you transform an adequate working group into an exceptional, high-performing team.

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